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How to Handle Angry Customers

No matter what industry you are in and no matter how excellent your products or services are, you will always have angry customers. Unfortunately, it’s an inevitable part of business. But that doesn’t mean you should sit back and let your haters be angry.

In fact, 91% of unhappy customers will not willingly do repeat business with you, and bad customer experience reaches twice as many ears as good experiences.

Thankfully, there are a few ways you can turn these negative encounters into positive ones. In this post, we’ll cover four strategies that can help you do exactly that.

But before we get started with the strategies that can help you, let’s have a quick refresher on the concept of net promoter score, as it’ll be important to the framing of our discussion on how to improve customer relationships.

First, you’ll need a dashboard reporting tool like Data Pine to track metrics like NPS in the first place. Once you’ve got that set up, we can get into the nitty-gritty.

Essentially, customers who give ratings of 6 or less are marked as detractors who can potentially tell their friends, family, or social following about their poor experience.

Conversely, promoters score 9 or 10 on the survey, and will likely spread positive brand awareness about your company.

You can calculate your own NPS with the following formula:

Here’s the problem: it is brutally hard to get more promoters. You can’t just snap your fingers and hope they appear out of thin air. And to make matters worse, you need them. For every angry detractor that leaves a review, there are 26 additional detractors:

If you notice that you have plenty of negative reviews or press online, it’s time to develop a plan to adapt.

Here are a few ways you can do this right now:

1. Respond to customer complaints faster

A recent study found that 82% of consumers rate an immediate response when asking a sales or marketing question as “important” — and 90% of consumers feel the same way when it comes to customer service questions.

Nobody likes to see negative reviews on Yelp or Google. And it’s even worse to see them with zero responses from a company in question.

It tells customers that you simply don’t care, even if that’s not the case.

Conversely, seeing positive reviews that go in detail about your brand can literally increase your conversion rates by multiple percentage points. For example, take a look at this review from a customer at Zoma:

Once your team identifies these public untagged mentions, have them start engaging with customers on social media. Because let’s face it, nothing is more frustrating for a consumer than when companies fail to respond. This only creates a further negative experience and increases the chance of negative posts in the future.

That’s why I highly recommend expanding to podcast and video if you want to succeed in 2020 and beyond. I write more about how to start a podcast on AdamEnfroy.com for those looking to step up their marketing strategy this year. And social media should be a big part of your brand engagement strategy beyond just posting company updates. While sharing company updates and your latest blog post is great — that type of content is down 50% in engagement.

At the end of the day, successful social media is all about authentic brand interactions. Engage with your customers, share user-generated content, be real with your followers, be omnipresent, and they will in-turn become more loyal brand advocates.

2. Implement customer feedback

It’s tempting to just tune out customer complaints and treat them as a few bad apples in the bunch. But more often than not, potential angry customers have great feedback that can help you refine your product or service offering.

And simply not listening to them would be a huge mistake.

Because they are on the outside looking in, their feedback may fix things that you potentially hadn’t thought of.

For instance, check out this interaction between United Airlines and a customer regarding the in-flight food service:

Instead of brushing the customer off as being picky, they genuinely appreciated the advice and internally reviewed it, working to improve the service going forward.

3. Fix the problem or offer incentives

As a growing company, it can be hard to take a loss on certain things — especially when it comes to paying customers. But if there are no other viable solutions, it only makes sense to fix the problem by compensating a user for the errors made.

Offering refunds, incentives, or fixing the problem is a great way to please angry customers and keep them loyal for years to come. And these don’t have to be huge, major investments. A free month of service or a small discount could do the trick.

So, how can you scale this process and limit the downsides? I recommend using various sales automation tools that will allow you to keep track of customer engagements:

81% of consumers state that they want brands to better understand their needs, wants, and pain points. While 74% of marketers say targeted personalization increases customer engagement. And with millions of blog posts going up daily, it’s no wonder consumers are craving personalized content: the market is saturated by unpersonalized fodder.

If you are still sending generic content to customers via your newsletter or blog, you need to re-evaluate. Providing content personalization can improve user experience and prevent customers from getting angry in the first place.

Conclusion

Angry detractors have the ability to spread harmful information about your brand. Reviews are one of the biggest sources of trust and authority, and negative reviews can tank your sales. It’s imperative that you manage detractors and turn them into brand promoters instead.

Follow the tips in this post to stay on top of brand mentions and keep your brand perception in good favor.

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